For some years, the Academy Awards have been seeking to shake up their annual telecast, in an attempt to freshen the ceremony and lure a larger – and younger – audience. Veteran producers have been let go; edgier hosts employed – and ratings continued to fall.
This year, however, a radical reinvention of the ceremony has been all but forced on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, following the decision of Kevin Hart to step down three days after he was announced as host in December.
Hart – an actor and comedian particularly popular with exactly the demographic the Oscars were keen to court – was reportedly told to apologise anew for homophobic remarks he had made in the past or quit his post.
He chose the latter, but speculation had been strong as no replacement was unveiled – and Hart did indeed apologise a few days later anyway. Last week, he appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’s chatshow and declared he would be open to a return, if only to “take a stand against the trolls” who he felt had hounded him online.
But the backlash to the interview was considerable, with many objecting to Hart’s appropriation of victimhood and DeGeneres’s agreement with his assessment that his detractors were simply “haters”.
Reports have now emerged in the Hollywood trade press that the telecast team have resigned themselves to the lack of a replacement and sought instead to secure the services of countless stars to act as awards presenters.
Top of the producers Donna Gigliotti and Glenn Weiss’s wish list for the 24 February show is said to be the cast of the Avengers franchise, ahead of the release two months later of the “final” instalment, Endgame.
The 2013 telecast featured a dry run for such an event, with Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner and Samuel L Jackson together on stage, among many others. ABC, the network that broadcasts the Oscars in the US, is owned by Disney, which also now owns Marvel.
Should such topline talent be enticed on to the stage, a host-free setup could be perceived as a win-win: audiences are reportedly increasingly bored by the political rhetoric that can make up much of the patter of an official emcee, while publicists and studios would be pleased by the diminished opportunities for the ceremony to go off-script.
Such a situation is not entirely without precedent: in 1989, producer Allan Carr and director Jeff Margolis oversaw a show that replaced the opening monologue with a now-infamous 11-minute musical number involving a duet between the actor Rob Lowe and an unknown actor, Eileen Bowman, dressed as Snow White.
The show was appallingly received by critics, audiences and all those present in the room, with Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews and Billy Wilder signing an open letter deriding it as “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry”.
Lowe is still attempting to live it down, while Bowman returned to her San Diego hometown the following morning, never to return to Los Angeles. Carr never worked again and lived most of the remaining years of his life as a recluse.
Multiple hosts have also been sighted through the years, with Bob Hope, Jack Lemmon, Rosalind Russell and Donald Duck sharing the billing in 1958, Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson in 1973 and Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn and Paul Hogan in 1987.
The most recent example came in 2011, when James Franco and Anne Hathaway acted as co-hosts. Their efforts were widely perceived to be disastrous, with a striking lack of chemistry or humour, and had a negative impact on the careers of both.
Speaking in 2017, Franco again denied being stoned during the engagement, but did admit to having either “high or low energy. In my head, I was trying to be the straight man. I guess I just went too far or came across as the dead man … I mean, I shouldn’t have been doing it”.